My aim in this chapter is to contribute to what the volume calls the ‘third move’ in International Relations norm studies, which explicitly addresses the legitimacy of the norm being studied as well as its influence on practice. I build on the work of those who point to the relevance of classical American Pragmatism, which considers how we know that what we are doing is appropriate once we realise that norms are the product of social and historical practices rather than abstract moral foundations. I trace the Pragmatist’s commitment to deliberative inquiry through the ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey and relate it to Antje Wiener’s arguments that normativity is sustained through proactive contestation. While there are overlaps between the two approaches, I argue that Deweyan Pragmatism can help us understand when it is appropriate to defend a norm against contestation. It does this by drawing on what Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’, understood as the background knowledge that has epistemic authority because it is the product of a deliberative and inclusive process of inquiry. I develop this with reference to debates within Pragmatist philosophy before applying it to offer a preliminary assessment of global health norms.

Functional psychology was less a system than an attitude that valued the utility of psychological inquiry. Assuming a philosophical underpinning from the pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, functional psychology fit well into the pioneering spirit of America. From its beginning, functional psychology had a clear emphasis on applying psychology to individual and social improvement, as was evident from the works of Münsterberg, McDougall, and Hall. The tradition of British natural science and evolutionary theory was integrated into psychology in the views on adaptation championed by the Chicago functionalists, such as Dewey, Angell, and Carr. Mental testing and the study of human capacity constituted important areas of investigation among the Columbia functionalists, represented by Cattell, Thorndike, and Woodworth. Although its reaction to structural psychology kept functional psychology from developing a systematic alternative model of psychological inquiry, this phase of American psychology resulted in two critical benefits. First, functionalism firmly entrenched the new science of psychology in America and imposed on it a particular American orientation toward applied psychology. Second, functional psychology provided a necessary transition from the restricted context of structural psychology to more viable models of psychology, permitting the science to progress.

This chapter investigates the interplay of textual and non-textual features in the marking systems of three types of clay products widely used in Roman Italy during the first three centuries CE ‒ fine tableware (sigillata), shipping containers (amphorae), and bricks and tiles. The semiotic flexibility of the footprint as a polyvalent sign indicating both authorship and identity is illustrated by its use as a stamp on Roman tableware. The marks employed on amphorae to identify different phases of the manufacture, transport, and distribution of the vessels or their contents reveal a well-defined taxonomy of textual and atextual signs differentiated according to medium, placement, and stage of application. Brickstamps on larger bricks at Rome combined texts with semantically distinctive figured symbols (signa) in complex messages that identified brickyard owner, manufacturer, and origin; smaller bricks, when marked, bore distinctive patterns of atextual designs created by matrix. Atextual marking systems operated both together with and independently of textual markers, offering different advantages of utility (visual comprehensibility without need of literacy) and facility (being easily constructed out of everyday objects) in return for less semantic precision and differential range.

Despite his role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to classical pragmatism Rorty’s work has blocked the road of inquiry. His selective interpretations spurred sharp lines of demarcation distinguishing “classical” or “paleo” pragmatism from its “neo” and “new” offspring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from Rorty’s distortive readings. This chapter seeks to move contemporary pragmatism beyond these impasses by investigating largely unexamined avenues of shared commitment between Rorty and Peirce, Dewey, and James. I argue that Rorty is best read as reconstructing classical pragmatism rather than misunderstanding it. After establishing Rorty’s underappreciated early engagement with pragmatism, I trace the influence of Peirce on Rorty’s thought, which includes a commitment to language and to a distinct form of realism which was later obscured. Recognizing Rorty’s notion of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a close relative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as cultural criticism yields complementary insights overshadowed by the experience vs. language debate. I then elucidate the shared ethics of belief that emerges from James’s “unfinished” universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency to guide their commitments to agency and a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true.

Researchers in linguistic anthropology and post-variationist sociolinguistics have over recent decades increasingly converged on a shared focus of attention: the unfolding real-time process of communicative activities that involve language – spoken/heard, written, digitally mediated – in concert with the other semiotic affordances that provide participants with the means to presume upon, and to (re)create, the very contexts in which forms of talk take place, with various effects in the here-and-now and beyond. Sociolinguists emerging from the confines of variationism have increasingly abandoned the operationalism and quasi-experimentalism of earlier work in favor of more ethnographically rich accounts that take note of the way that facts about sociophonetic variation not only reflect but also help to constitute identities also made manifest in other ways: through styles of dress, bodily practices, consumption patterns, etc. – a set of facts and interpretations often grouped by sociolinguists under the heading of “style.” Linguistic anthropologists, meanwhile, have been increasingly oriented to the way in which observed variation in language usage resolves itself into verbal (phonological, lexical, etc.) repertoires keyed to the interactional contours of recurring types of situation with recurring types of participant role – termed “registers.” Linguistic anthropologists have also been alert to the ways in which linguistic and semiotic resources that are by degrees regularized and presumed “normal” in some contexts (hence, “enregistered”) are, by that very fact, ripe for creative “recycling” and reuse in other contexts, with different effects. All of these disciplinary and transdisciplinary re-alignments, I argue, result from the introduction of a single centrally important analytic concept: indexicality. Introduced into modern linguistics by Jakobson and developed further by Jakobson’s student Silverstein, the concept of indexicality has enabled the recent co-alignment of erstwhile disciplinary forms of inquiry in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and seems to be the fulcrum for much of the work now emerging at the intersection of these and other fields, including applied linguistics.